Wednesday, February 20, 2019

It's not an Error, it's a Feature: My love of Rememorex's Tracking Error mechanic.

Saturday afternoon. Nine of my friends come in, and we start to play 7th Sea. It's my first time starting a long form tabletop campaign with this group, especially with 7th Sea. It was a short game, due to the size. Amongst my post game notes I have, underlined:

KEEP THE PLAYERS INVESTED: USE TRACKING ERRORS NEXT TIME.

Tracking Errors were designed for the Omnisystem, debuting in Nerdy City's game ReMemorex. In a game of 80's horror in suburban land, tracking errors allowed players not in the scene the chance to effect it in indirect ways. This gave the game a sense of watching a found VHS tape and seeing weird distortions in the tape. It's been helpful considering that Sean Jaffe, the creator of ReMemorex, ran the game with more than a dozen players at one time in a West March style.

A helping hand, placing a shovel where a fleeing PC can use it to flee or bar a monster's path; A monkey wrench, used to give the PCs more of a challenge (within reason); a cameo, where the player takes on the role of an NPC in the scene; adding a detail to the scene to make it more sad/tragic/horrific/funny; or creating the greatest element of an 80's movie: a montage.

It's one of my favorite tools in gaming, right now. One of the bigger problems I see in games is that when players aren't in the scene, they lose interest. They lose interest, they start going off. They start going off, then it's hard to get them all back. It's why I hate combat in most games, why I hate splitting up the party. Time is precious and if half your game is spent staring at your phone looking at facebook, then you need to rethink your game.

By having a system like the tracking error, you decrease that. It makes being out of game part of the game.

One of the key facets of the tracking error is the ritual of using it. You grab a handful of dice (Ominsystem used six-sided dice, but there were always a handful of 20 or 10 sided just for the effect) and throw them on the table to declare. The dice and the numbers you get don't matter, the importance is the ritual of throwing the dice, breaking the fourth wall.

In general, everyone got one use of a Tracking Error per scene, otherwise there is nothing stopping someone from spamming its use. If you have a game system that has a number of meta-points to spend on certain effects, like Evil Hat's FATE Points or the Hero Points of 7th Sea, this adds an added element in the economy of your game. To use 7th Sea closely, Hero points are gained by doing things appropriate to the character and used to do BIG COOL THINGS and HELP OTHER CHARACTERS. I'm fairly even handed in giving them out and that makes SPENDING them a hell of a lot easier, especially since they may not get to do so if they aren't in the scene.

In short, by allowing people to do more stuff out of scene, they potentially buy in to doing more in scene because it nets them more points and the other players are more inclined to pay it back.

The Tracking Error is a simple solution to a persistent problem in gaming: keeping your player's focus on the table. You can't guarantee it, but you can make downtime become just another form of play. And that's a handy tool to have.

And I'm not afraid of my players getting confused with the new addition to the system. Most of them are Nerdy City and the Original ReMemorex players. But if you do start using something similar in your games. Let me know.

Later.


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